Of Bassetisms and Definitions
by saoulbete
Summary: Jane ponders just exactly what she and Maura are. Incredibly schmoopy fluff. -c&c-


A/N - this is pretty much a direct sequel to Crosswords and Coffee. It stands alone, but is a sequel. Thank you all, again, so very much for the giant outpouring of support for that. It's a little overwhelming. I've spent ten years in fandom, and have never, ever come across a group of people as warm and welcoming as all of y'all.

* * *

She sat there, staring at the crossword puzzle, wondering where to even start. It had become something of a routine, now that she was finally starting to get _good_ at them. It had started almost six months before, with them being forced in a car to Jersey, six hours of nothing but highway, all to reclaim what was rightfully theirs – a killer that they'd been hunting for months without being able to find – and now a guy with the same MO, same little quirks had popped up further down the East Coast. And with all the flights out of Logan on hold due to some strike or something – she really wasn't quite sure what was going on at the airport – they'd been forced to drive.

Or rather, been forced to endure Maura's driving, as she had been nursing a broken collarbone, right arm in a sling. She didn't even have a good story for the injury. It would have been one thing if she had gotten it in the line of duty. It would have been a battle scar, a war wound, something she could be proud of. But no, she had been the idiot that had decided that no, she didn't need a proper ladder to change the bulb over the sink, the chair would be just fine. The chair that she'd been meaning to fix the leg on for weeks. When Bass had decided to walk underneath it and bump into the bad leg it sent her - most of her- her right shoulder decided the center island was a much nicer location – to the ground. She'd almost hoped it would have been her dominant hand. At least she could drive right handed. But unable to work the gearshift, she had no choice but to let Maura drive. It didn't, however, stop her from bitching. So when they had stopped for gas somewhere in Connecticut, Maura had grabbed the first distraction she could find – one of those jumbo books of crosswords, and shoved it at Jane, if only to stop her from complaining.

And when she realized that she really wasn't bad at them, the pop culture clues being easy, and the obscure factual knowledge clues were things she could just ask Maura, she'd grown to like them. Grown to enjoy Maura's subscription to the New York Times, as she snagged the puzzle page and Maura the style section while they sat and ate breakfast every morning. She liked the challenge of trying to get into Will Shortz' mind and figure out just where the clues where coming from. But Sundays, Sundays still stumped her more often than not.

She felt Maura come up behind her, warm arms wrapping around her and a gentle head on her shoulders. She turned her head to kiss her girlfriend, something that was definitely more interesting than the crossword. She wondered why they hadn't started this sooner, this whole kissing thing. She'd been living with Maura for almost a year now, and they finally woke up to what they had less than four months prior. It was still new, exciting, wonderful. It wasn't quite what she would have expected, but it was so uniquely _them._

They were still sorting out what exactly they were. When out in public, amidst everyone else, she had no problems with defining them as what they were. A couple. But at work, at home, it was different. It was harder to admit that they'd spent all this time as just friends and had only now evolved to something more. She was still working through her own issues with being the stereotypical lesbian cop, no matter how often Maura told her that she was anything but stereotypical. But girlfriends implied something...else. It implied something too young and immature for what they were.

Partner – well, it didn't work well when you were a cop. It was fine for all those civilian couples out there, but she had a partner, and that was Frost. Significant other sounded too clinical. Too politically correct for her. She sighed slightly as they broke the kiss, Maura taking a moment to look over the crossword. "I thought you'd have learned that an Agora is an ancient marketplace?" She moved to where Maura's finger was indicating the clue, swiftly filling in the word.

She looked at the starred clues – something Maura had taught her to do – attempting to find some link between them. _Bassetism for asterisms_ made her think dog, but the other clues seemed to have nothing to do with anything canid. Her eye catches on a clue that implies it hints at the others – _Author Pelham Grenville also a hint to the starred clues_ She wracked her brain knowing that she _knew_ this one, before it dawned on her, and she filled in _Wodehouse_ easily, feeling the twitch of Maura's brow against her own. "Pop-Pop used to read us Wodehouse stories. They're wicked funny." She responded to the unasked question, recalling the times that her grandfather would sit the three Rizzoli children down, and read to them – something that had lasted until Jane had been a teenager. She missed it sometimes, sitting crosslegged on the floor and listening to a gravelly voice read to them.

She felt Maura smile against her neck and point out _Epee_ as _Not a Sabre or a Foil._"You ever read those, hon?" The pet names had sort of fallen into place without either of them realizing it. It just was another natural progression of their relationship. Things just happened. They didn't know why, they didn't really know how, they just _did._ It had just become a natural thing to go from holding each other as they slept to holding each other while decidedly less clothed and decidedly more sweaty while they slept.

"Can't say that I have." She stares at a clue starting to fill something in before erasing it quickly, frowning at the way the damp eraser streaked across the paper. Maura thought the way that she chewed her pencils was adorable. Each one had the same perfect divot of teeth around it, in that hard wood just below where the metal bit held the eraser in place.

"They're good. Funny. I have some – somewhere."

"You mean to say Jane Rizzoli owns books?" She couldn't help the little snort of laughter and the easy smile.

"I know, hard to believe, right?" She liked this. Liked the easy banter between them. Liked the way that they could sit there – well she was sitting – Maura was sorta doing something that resulted in most of the ME's weight being pressed against Jane's back. That they could sit there, and cuddle, and banter about crossword clues, and tease each other, and just enjoy being around one another. "I should find them. You'd like them."

She pondered out _Goose _ as _one taking a gander_ – she'd gotten used to that one, it was one of those words like _oleo_ that somehow managed to slip in at least once a week. She was pretty sure _oleo_ was in so many crosswords that the puzzle editors got a kickback from the margarine industry. She starts filling in _Bea-_ for _*Leave it to __ before she catches herself, erasing the letters and filling in _Psmith_ instead.

That's what she and Maura were like She was the Mike to Maura's Psmith. The level-headed counterpart to an eccentric genius. She hadn't read the novels in a long time, but she remembered enough to know that Mike was the straight man, the one who tempered out the eccentricities of the other. And that Psmith had been the one to turn Mike from a one-note character into someone interesting, more than just a cricket player. Just like her and Maura. Maura brought out a different side of her, that wasn't just the tomboy, wasn't just the cop. She tempered Maura's controlled insanity, brought humanity to the doctor.

She frowns a little bit as Maura stands, pulling away from her and starting another one of her fancy French press coffees. She's aware of Maura in her periphery, and she's not sure when that sixth sense has started, but she doesn't want it to ever leave. She always seems to know where the other woman is, and she's comforted by that. It's like a homing device tucked into some corner of her heart.

It's also useful when they're fighting – giving her a two minute warning to fight or flight her way out of the situation. So far it's served her well for things like her habit of leaving her dirty laundry all over the house, and not hanging the bathmat up to dry when she gets out of the shower, and the way Maura can't help but attract men to her like so many moths to flame. She's learned how to avoid Maura for the hour or so it takes for them to calm down and forget what it was that had drawn the other's ire, knowing that their spats are just their way of knowing that they each need some room to _breathe_ and that by the time they'd spend the day apart, they'd both be craving each other again.

_*Inimitable_ doesn't even need the star, with a _J_ and a _V_ already filled in, and she adds the rest of the letters mechanically. That was what she and Maura were like Jeeves and Wooster. Two parts to a whole, with a tie that binds holding them together. After all, Maura had the braniac part down, the ability to recite things in a very Jeeves-like fashion when asked about anything, really. Although that would mean that she would be admitting to be as mentally negligible as Bertie Wooster. And she wasn't sure if she liked that too much.

Somewhere her brain manages to decode _asterism_ as star, some forgotten bit of trivia that Maura had imparted on her at some point in time, and that had stayed put, and decoded _Bassetism for asterisms_ as _God's daisy chain_ as in, "the stars were." She looked up for a moment, watching the easy way Maura puttered around the kitchen, completely relaxed and at home, and everything was perfect. This was – this was what happiness, real happiness felt like. Even Korsak and Frost had noticed it. They gently teased, and she had the vague idea that they knew what was going on, even though she'd never told them as much.

They were quite content to let people assume what they wanted. In public, they had no problems with holding hands, trading chaste kisses back and forth when they walked along the river, doing all the sorts of silly little couples things that couples do. They ignored the detractors, and smiled at the way that an innocent little child had said that they "didn't realize old people could still be in love." before bickering about whether or not the kid had just called them old, or if it was just that skewing of age that young children have.

They talked about their future, sometimes, both of them keeping things purposely vague. Children were an eventuality, likely going to be a sooner than a later if only to avoid Angela's incessant nagging when the Rizzoli matron found out about what they were – something that they were putting off until _they _knew what they were. They talked about a vacation to someplace warm and sandy, and bickered about whether or not Tahiti or Aruba would be a better vacation locale. They spent their nights curled around each other, and found that their sleep when alone – when Maura had disappeared to a conference in Chicago for three days – when Jane had some lead that required her to be out til all hours of the night – was not nearly as restful.

She attempts to focus back on the crossword when Maura looks up and catches her staring. She knows from the smirk she gets that she's just been caught red handed staring at Maura with some sort of wistful, soppy look that she was constantly being told she had, but she refused to believe until Maura had gone as far as to sneak a picture of it, which now popped up next to Jane's number whenever she called. She hated that _that_ picture now identified her, and complained about it every chance she got. She looked like a lovesick teenager, and she knew if Frost or Frankie saw it that she would never live down the teasing. Secretly, it's her favorite picture of herself.

She looks at the crossword, and figures out _Bassetism for amorisms_ is _Specific Dream Rabbit_ and smiles, thinking of just how much she'd hated the phrase the first time she'd heard it coming off of her grandfather's lips and how utterly silly it was. She had sworn, right then and there at the age of nine, that she was never going to be a Madeline Basset. She was never going to wistfully fall in love and do any of that romantic crap that seemed to undermine everything that her teachers told her about growing up to be whoever she wanted to be.

But now, there was some part of her – the same part of her that had loved watching _Cinderella_ and _Beauty and the Beast_ when she was little, that could understand where the sentiment came from. She finished the puzzle, proud of herself that she managed to get a Sunday puzzle solved without breaking a pencil, throwing something, or relying on Maura to solve most of the clues for her. Granted, it was a puzzle with a theme that she had an unfair advantage in, but still, she'd solved a Sunday puzzle.

She stood, wandering over to behind Maura, wrapping her arms around slender shoulders, pulling her close. "I love you." She whispered breathily against an ear, giving a little nibble to the top of it. She loved how they fit together, perfectly. Maura was the perfect height in flats for her to bury her nose in golden hair, and hold her perfectly close.

"Do you now?" She leans down to where Maura has her head tilted, placing a kiss to those smirking lips.

"Yep."

"Why don't you show me, then?" She grinned as they head back towards a bedroom they'd left less than an hour before.

Later, while they're laying there, wrapped around each other, content to enjoy the post-coital haze, she leans in again, nuzzling against Maura's neck, enjoying the surprisingly strong arm wrapped around her. She loved this, the way that Maura clung to her like a possessive octopus. She wasn't quite sure where all the limbs that pinned her in place came from, but she couldn't complain. "You're my specific dream rabbit." She says, finally figuring out exactly what they were. They weren't _partners_ or _girlfriends_ or _significant others_ or _certain special someones._ Maura was her specific dream rabbit, and she wouldn't have it any other way.


End file.
